David Horowitz’s new
database DiscoverTheNetwork.org presents itself as a “guide to the political
left.” In less than two months it has been visited by nearly 625,000
individuals in 116 countries and has sparked a great deal of controversy. This
controversy has been focused on what constitutes the left, specifically what
individuals and organizations should be considered in this database. Objections
have been raised to the inclusion of entertainers like Barbara Streisand and
Sean Penn, Democrats like Howard Dean and Barack Obama and above all Islamic
radicals like blind shiek Omar Abdel Rachman and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In all
candor, most of the controversy took the form of ridicule and name calling --
familiar responses of the left when under challenge. There was a striking lack
of intellectual comment and argument.

Part of the explanation for this failure to express
disagreement in the form of an intellectual argument, we suspect, has to do
with the left’s undisputed domination over the institutions of the higher
culture – the universities, the large metropolitan press, and the TV networks.
This dominance has caused it to inhabit a cultural echo chamber where the only
interlocutor it really has to speak to (and answer to) is itself. Consequently,
it has grown intellectually lazy and reaches for the most convenient epithet
before it ever thinks about an argument. It has substituted emotional reflexes
for ideas for so long that it has become a kind of latter day version of the
conservatism that Lionel Trilling described as a “mental irritability” rather
than an intellectual reference.

While the left often looks these days like a set of
reactionary reflexes to conservative innovations, if we thought this was all
the left was we would not have devoted several years to building our database
at DiscoverTheNetwork.org, nor would we be attempting the present enterprise,
which is to overcome the refusal of the left to discuss itself with us on its
own and to invite it to discuss itself on our territory.

This is the first in what we hope will be a lengthy
series of conversations with leftists about radicalism and leftism and
liberalism and conservatism. We begin by inviting the first of three prominent
members of the Left to discuss our new database with David Horowitz. Our guest
today is Michael Berube, the Paterno Family Professor of Literature at
Pennsylvania State University in University Park. He has a website at www.MichaelBerube.com, which featured one of the most linked satires
attacking the idea behind DiscovertheNetwork.org.

Prof. Berube, let's begin with you. Tell us your
thoughts on this new database.

Berube:
My thoughts on it are pretty straightforward: it’s a database of liberals, progressives,
leftists, and far-leftists. But it clearly seems designed to blur the
distinctions not only between the mainstream left and the far far left, but
between the far left and liberals such as Barack Obama, Barbra Streisand, and
Bill Moyers.David himself says as
much:“It should be obvious that even
the otherwise innocent Barbra Streisand shares negative views of the Bush
Administration and its mission of liberating Iraq with anti-American jihadists
like the aforementioned [Abu Musab] Zarqawi, even though we are sure that she
deplores some of his methods.”By that
standard, anyone with negative views of the Bush administration or the war in
Iraq is an ally of Zarqawi.Suffice it
to say that I don't think this mode of argumentation -- construing liberal
dissenters as supporters of terrorists -- is appropriate for people living in
republics and democracies.

More specifically, my objection to the Network is
this. It’s one thing to associate [International ANSWER’s Brian Becker, Ramsey
Clark, or [National Lawyers Guild convicted terrorist] Lynne Stewart with
political Islamists; these people truly have gone around the bend, and are
making what amounts to a red-brown alliance between the far far left and the
far far right of Islamism. It’s quite another thing -- an indefensible thing, I
think -- to suggest, as this database does, that there is a ‘network’ linking
people like Katie Couric to Mohammed Atta, Zacarias Moussaoui to Roger
Ebert.So this ‘network’ deliberately
confuses the distinction between people who criticize Lynne Stewart and Ramsey
Clark and people who support them, and this fact alone renders the very idea of
a ‘network’ incoherent.

FP: Mr. Horowitz?

DH:
Of course we did not design the database to blur distinctions. We designed it
first of all to make the distinction between the left and everyone else, and
secondly to describe the particular positions of the left and their networks
and to distinguish between them.

The database clearly identifies five categories of
leftists: “Totalitarian Radicals,” “Anti-American Radicals,” “Leftists,”
“Moderate Leftists” and “Affective Leftists.” How are these distinctions
blurred if they are made? How, for example, does the database “blur the
distinctions between the mainstream left and the far far left” or “between the
far left and liberals such as Barack Obama?” as Berube claims, when Barack
Obama is clearly identified as a “Leftist” and not a “Totaliatiran Radical” or
an “Anti-American Radical?”I notice
that Berube doesn’t identify a single statement that we have made about Barack
Obamaor any other entry in the database that is either
false, inappropriate or misleading.

In contrast, I could write an entire book about the
false, inappropriate and misleading statements about any given conservative on
leftwing sites like MediaMatters, MediaTransparency, NameBase, RightwingWatch
and the like.)In other words, we have
actually made the distinctions Berube claims we haven’t, and we have done them
in a responsible, fair-minded and accurate way. Berube’s claim reduces itself
to the claim that all these names of people who are “far left,” “left” “liberal”
(his terms) are included in a single “database of the left.” The issue, in
other words, is whether there can be said to be a “left” that includes all
these individuals, disparate and otherwise.

What Berube actually seems to disagree about is whether
Barack Obama or Roger Ebert, for example, should be described as “liberals” or
a leftists.”My question to him would
be how can someone who supports racial preferences, income redistribution, and
unlimited expansion of the nanny state, and who is comfortable with university
faculties from which conservatives are virtually excludedbe regarded as a “liberal?” Reasonable
people may disagree on this, but we certainly have a right to identify modern
liberals as belonging to the classic left. However, one may come down on this
particular question– whether Obama is a leftist, or a moderate leftist or a
liberal -- surely no reasonable person can maintain that we have blurred
distinctions when we have actually codified them.

Whether actual liberals (by our standards), e.g.,
Senator Joseph Lieberman, New Republic Editors Martin Peretz and Peter
Beinart, Slate editor Jacob Weisberg, NBC reporter Tim Russert belong in a
database on the left is a difficult question. All of them are Democrats and
thus deeply enmeshed in networks that obviously identify themselves as left (or
“progressive”). There is, in fact, a profound battle going on in the Democratic
Party for the soul of liberalism and we cannot predict what the outcome will
be. But are comfortable including these – or people like them -- in this
database precisely because we have made the internal distinctioins between
those on the left who are radicals andtotalitarians and those who are opposed to radicals and totalitarians.

Berube’s claim that I have conflated Barbra Streisand
and Zarqawi is unintelligible. To say that two people share some views – in
this case opposition to American policy in Iraq – is not the same as saying
that any critic of policy is an ally of Zarqawi. Although I notice that people
who really want America to lose the war on terror often have a guilty
conscience that makes them feel hunted in precisely this manner. But as I have
explained many times, and most recently in my essay "Why
We Are In Iraq," not all criticism of American policy is the same, and
I certainly do not make that mistake. Calling Bush Hitler in the midst of a war
is one kind of criticism; calling his policy mistaken is quite another.
Agitating to have American troops defect from their service in the war terror,
as many so-called “peace” organizations do, cannot be regarded simply as
justifable “criticism” of the war. Why are Zarqawi and Streisand in the same
database, or Zarqawi and Michael Moore, or Noam Chomsky and Ward Churchill? It
is a question the left really has to answer for itself.

How can people who claim to be for women’s rights, gay
rights, equality and freedom take sides against America when it is at war with
Islamic terrorists who oppress women and gays and who have declared war on
democracy and equality? I have answered this question in my book, Unholy Alliance: Radical
Islam and the American Left, which provides the rationale for the
design of DiscoverTheNetwork.org, which Berube doesn’t like. Not a single
leftist has commented on this book however. This reflects how intellectually
lazy the left has become in examining itself and its commitments, and is why it
resorts to name-calling and derision when it is forced to confront an analysis
it does not like. If you don’t answer critics you find yourself unable to
articulate why you are marching shoulder to shoulder with your own ideology.

It should be mentioned that Unholy Alliance is not the
only book on the war on terror that links the Zarqawi Islamists with segments
of the American left that Berube would find familiar and also identify with.
Paul Berman a well-known leftwing author who despises conservatives in general (and
myself in particular) has written an insightful book, Terror and
Liberalism, which describes the affinities and alliances between American
leftists (for example attendees of the Socialist Scholars conference) and
Islamic terrorists.

Most people like to be judged by their intentions and
given wide latitude for their deeds. People on the left are no different.
Berube is asking us to judge opponents of the liberation of Iraq on the basis
of their stated intentions that women should have equal rights rather than on
their practical activities during the war, which – if successful --would have
kept Saddam in power and prevented Iraqi women from gaining their rights. We
regret that not being leftists ourselves we can’t indulge his narcissism in
this regard. But then when do leftists like him judge conservatives by their
intentions and not their deeds?

In any case, I have argued in Unholy
Alliance and elsewhere that in the post-Communist era, the left’s
intentions are even less important in understanding and evaluating their
agendas than they were in the past. This is a direct consequence of the
collapse of Communism and the socialist fantasy, and the lack of a coherent
plan for the revolutionary future. The left is united today only by its
commitment to “social justice” and “progressive values” which are vague
statements of the imploded socialist dream. The real unity – the organizing
principle as it were – of the left today likes in its its oppositions -- first
to the United States and then to the state of Israel. Another way of putting it
is that the left is defined by these oppositions. This is not a view peculiar
to me, though I believe Unholy Alliance is the first attempt to
systematically articulate it. I have posted a lengthy
analysis of the left’s history from 1945 to the present written by an
academic leftist Andrei S. Markovits for the
socialist magazine Dissentthat comes to exactly the same conclusions.I would welcome in these pages a leftist response to these
conclusions. So far I have not seen any.

The negative framework of the left’s agenda in the
political events following 9/11, that are described as the war on terror, can
be understood by referring to its anti-war effort during the American
intervention in Vietnam some forty years ago.

In the Vietnam War the United States had undertaken to
support a dictatorship in South Vietnam on the grounds that the dictatorship
was also anti-Communist, and therefore a lesser evil than a unified Communist
Vietnam. Some on the left supported the Communist totalitarians. But many “New
Leftists” were self-declared “anti-totalitarians” who believed that Communism
was a flawed attempt to create just societies. Moreover, they did not believe
that the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam was a Communist pawn (as it
was) but a quasi independent socialist and/or nationalist force. Their argument
for opposing the United States defense of the South Vietnamese regime was that
a victory for the NLF would mean the emergence of an independent Vietnam
committed to the principles of equality and justice. This was an incentive to
see that America was defeated. And this indeed is the delusional vision that
motivated people like Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda other anti-war activists, who
worked to cut off all aid to the regime in South Vietnam (and Cambodia as well)
that was fighting for its life against the Communists..

But in Iraq, America did not set out to defend a
dictatorship for whatever reasons. It set out to overthrow one. In Iraq the
United States overthrew a monster regime, and liberated women and Iraq’s
minorities -- and the left did everything in its power to prevent this. The
practical actions of the left were to save the regime of Saddam Hussein. But
what could saving Saddam Hussein mean but more corpses shoveled into mass
graves, more human beings stuffed into plastic shredders, more terror for the
Iraqi people, and further deferment of the rights of women and other
minorities.

Even after Saddam Hussein was toppled, the left’s
agendas were primarily to bring down the Bush Administration, not to help
American forces to consolidate the peace or establish an Iraqi democratic
state. Many leftists even actively support what they call the Iraqi
“resistance,” led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Others like Barbra Streisand and Michael
Berube didn’t like Saddam and don’t like Zarqawi but seem to fear George Bush
and American power even more. To read the publications of the left which
Michael Berube’s perspective since 9/11 – the Nation, the Progressive,
Salon.com, the Village Voice -- is to read relentless attacks on
the Patriot Act, on American military actions and America forces in Iraq, along
limitless skepticism about the American goal of establishing a democracy in the
Middle East. The sheer volume of this criticism adds up to a political action
against American purposes in this war. The impression reinforced by the virtual
absence constructive proposals for defeating the Zarqawi terrorists and
establishing a democratic regime.

So it’s not really the DiscoverTheNetwork team that
has to defend the decision to include Zarqawi and Streisand in the broad
networks that link disparate elements of the left. Rather it’s leftists like
Michael Berube who have to explain why they are engaging in a political course
of action which if successful would strengthen the global Islamic jihad
against the West, along with its misogynist, anti-minority and reactionary
agendas.

A point that may need reiterating (I have made it
before) is that the mere fact that people on the left disagree does not mean
that they are not on the left. As I observed in an earlier article on the
design of DiscoverTheNetwork, Trotsky and Stalin declared war on each other,
which ended with Trotsky’s murder by Stalin’s agents. But a responsible
complier of a database on Communism would still be obligated to include both of
these mortal enemies in the database.

FP:
Prof. Berube, aside from your problem with the distinctions that, according to
you, are not made, do you recognize that there is a “network” operating? Or do
you deny the existence of any network at all? Tell us what you think of a Lynne
Stewart and what she did. What was in her heart and why? What does it mean when
Michael Moore calls for the victory of our enemy in Iraq? Just for the record,
this is Michael Moore’s statement in his piece “Heads Up...from Michael Moore”
on his site MichaelMoore.com, April 14, 2004: “The Iraqis who have risen up
against the occupation are not "insurgents" or ‘terrorists’ or ‘The
Enemy.’ They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow --
and they will win.” Does this say something about the Left, especially since
Moore was an honored guest in Jimmy Carter’s box at the Democratic Convention?
Is there a chance that Moore’s propaganda activities may bring harm to this
nation and free peoples everywhere? As a member of the Left, do you feel a
sense of responsibility to say something here?

Berube:
Last question first:of course I have a
responsibility to criticize members of the Left who've gone around the bend,
and I have done so -- many times.It
was strikingly ungenerous of David not to acknowledge that, especially since I
criticized ANSWER in no uncertain terms on this very site two years ago. There
really is no basis whatsoever for David’s claim [in the article “Why Michael
Can’t Read” that “radicals like Berube can’t be bothered to actually read
or respond rationally to anything that ruffles their progressive feathers, let
alone be concerned about the fact that their entire political focus since 9/11
has been in getting our terrorist enemies off the hook.” And I’ve always
insisted that my opposite numbers on the Right have a responsibility to
criticize their lunatic fringe, which is why, six years ago, I went after
David’s appalling defense of Augusto Pinochet.

Now, is there a network here?That's a good question. When Hillary Clinton
named that “vast right-wing conspiracy,” she was really referring to a network
-- and I wish she’d used that term instead-- of people who belonged to groups
like the Rutherford Institute and the Federalist Society, who were working with
Congressional Republicans and figures in the right-wing media to impeach the
President. These people met, corresponded, and worked together toward a common
goal.Nothing comparable exists between
people like me and people like Brian Becker of ANSWER or Ramsey Clark, most
recently of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic, let alone
between people like Katie Couric or Bruce Springsteen and Lynne Stewart.

As for Stewart, hers is a sorry
story.I think that the New York
Times Magazine profile of her in September 2002 had it right:like Clark, Stewart has allowed her
opposition to US policy to make her embrace the very worst kind of “the enemy
of my enemy is my friend"” logic. I’m not aware of Moore saying anything
that batty with regard to Iraq, but I do know that whenever I come across a far
leftist speaking of the ‘Iraqi Maquis’-- or Arundhati Roy telling us that we
don’t have the luxury of supporting an Iraqi resistance more to our liking, and
so must support this one -- I dissent.Such sentiments are not part of any Left I call my own, because the
fringe Left that endorses them forfeits its moral authority to oppose
totalitarianism, torture, and terrorism.(And I invite the Right to join me in opposing all three!Anyone?)

To associate me (or Roger Ebert or Ted Kennedy or Ruth
Bader Ginsburg) with such fringe Leftists is to partake of precisely the same
‘logic; as that of the fringe Left itself:for Becker and Clark, the enemy of their enemy is their friend, and they
welcome figures like Milosevic or al-Sadr, because anyone who opposes the US
must be all right with them.Likewise,
in Discover the Network, anyone who does not support George Bush and the war in
Iraq is part of a “network” that extends to al-Qaeda. It’s the same fundamentalist
logic, and the same forfeiture of moral authority.

DH:
Well of course I specifically did not defend Pinochet in the article
he refers to; in fact I specifically criticized Pinochet. What I did
that upset Berube was to point out that Pinochet left his country prosperous
and democratic (he voluntarily submitted to a referendum which he lost) and to
contrast this to the fact that Fidel Castro is the longest surviving dictator
in the world and has made his country dramatically poorer than it was when he
took power. For this Berube called me a Nazi (to be precise he said he couldn’t
wait for my next article defending the Third Reich). Now that’s what I call
blurring distinctions, and I have to say it is pretty much a staple of the
“arguments” of the left, as I have encountered them.

In fact in my conservative career – and from the very
outset I – leftists have smeared me as a “renegade,” a supporter of contra
terrorists, a Nazi, a fascist, a racist, a homophobe, a McCarthyite, a
Stalinist, and most recently a Maoist. And these leftists attackers have ranged
from what Berube calls the “far far left” to People for the American Way and a
former Democratic Lieutenant Governor of Colorado, who described me both as a
McCarthyite and a Stalinist in her column in the Denver Post for merely
contemplating the creation of an online guide to the left, which she
referred to as a “snitch site.” So these complaints about
DiscoverTheNetwork are really like the pot calling the kettle black, only
worse, because we have gone to great lengths not to indulge in casual smears.

Turning to Berube’s point about Hillary, in the
interests of historical accuracy allow me first to point out that the reference
to the “vast right wing conspiracy” was in response to a question as to why
anyone would “invent” the charge that her husband had committed adultery with
Monica Lewinsky. Knowing full well that her husband had indeed committed the
act, denied it and instead maliciously identified a vast right wing conspiracy
as the author of the “lie.” In other words Hillary’s comment (which Berube
approves) was a classic McCarthyite attack on conservatives to cover her
husband’s misdeeds. And this is being unfair to McCarthy, since there actually
were Communists with malign agendas towards the United States whom he did
identify, whereas no one invented Monica Lewinsky. Berube’s willingness to take
at face value a malicious and false accusation from the left and at the same
time to deny the evidence presented in a database that took conservatives years
to research is revealing of how unable he is to maintain an intellectual
standard let alone appreciate how he is perceived by others.

Berube’s dissociation from the criminal activities of
Lynne Stewart and the Bolshevik dementias of International ANSWER are welcome
and yes – ever mindful of the distinctions between leftists – we provided Berube
a platform to express them on FrontPagemag.com. But this is only scratching the
surface of the problem that Lynne Stewart presents for the left.

Lynne Stewart is a fifty-year veteran of the
progressive left and a key player in its legal defense community. The
organizations that have been her political base include the National Lawyers
Guild and the Center for Constitutional Rights, two pillars of the anti-Patriot
Act movement, the immigration reform movement, the reparations movement, the
affirmative action movement, the solidarity movement and other causes of the
broadly based left of which Berube is a part. If Berube will consult the
database he will see that these are working allies – and share personnel with
-- the American Civil Liberties Union, the Ford Foundation, and the Tides
Center (to name just a few of its allies) and thus with the core institutions
of the activist left of which Berube considers himself a part. Berube’s
political friend, Todd Gitlin, a fellow critic of International ANSWER and of
the politics of Lynne Stewart shared platforms with Lynne Stewart at the
Socialist Scholars Conference. In his book Liberalism and Terror, Paul
Berman has described how this Conference – which represents a pretty broad
spectrum of the progressive left – gave a warm ovation to a speaker who
justified suicide bombing. So both the network and the blur are realities; we
didn’t create them; we have just described them, and have done so as
scrupulously and accurately as we are able.

Contrary to Berube’s understanding, Stewart is most
definitely not someone operating under the formula, “the enemy of my enemy is
my friend.” For Stewart the enemy is her friend. Stewart is a Communist
and a terrorist and believes in her heart that the Islamic terrorists are
freedom fighters, and she has said so in so many words (her statements are
gathered in Unholy Alliance). The fact that Berube and others
dissociated themselves from Stewart after she was caught in terrorist
activities is a good beginning, but it is not the whole story, since Stewart’s
communist and terrorist sympathies were the substance of her politics for
years, with no visible dissent from Berube. Her anti-American, pro-terrorist
sympathies are shared by organizations like the National Lawyers Guild and the
Center for Constitutional Rights which are integral to the causes of the
political left. New Republic editor Peter Beinart has called on liberals
to purge from their ranks individuals and organizations like the National
Lawyers Guild (and even MoveOn.org) that oppose America’s war against radical
Islam. Berube has written a critical
response to Beinart, which suggests that he himself is not ready for such
steps. This is the real issue. If Berube doesn’t want to be associated with
supporters of terrorism, he has to do a lot more than separate himself from one
embarrassingly caught and convicted individual and some holy rollers from the
International ANSWER.

I
haven’t seen Berube dissociating himself, for example, from the Coalition
United For Peace and Justice, described by the New York Times, Salon and
others as the “moderate” peace movement. Does Berube think that the politics of
the leaders of this organization differ significantly from those of
International ANSWER as far as the war on terror is concerned? Medea Benjamin
and Leslie Cagan the principal organizers of the CUPJ are two pro-Castro
communists, (Cagan with a capital C, Benjamin with a small c). Leslie Cagan, who
is a lifelong member of the Communist Party organized protests against the
Vietnam war, movements for solidarity with the Communist guerrillas in Central
America, and against the first Gulf War. Her lifelong sympathies lie with
America’s enemies, yet she is the leader of a “peace” coalition that includes
factions which extend from the Communist Party and radical Islamic
organizations to People for the American Way, the National Council of Churches
and MoveOn.org. What does Berube have to say about this network, and where do
his own agendas part company with this coalition?

FP:
Prof. Berube?

Berube: The American right needs to dissociate itself from:

--
the torture and murder of random Iraqis and Afghans

-- its support of South African apartheid

-- its support of violent, ultrareligious homophobic
patriarchs in the US

-- its support of violent, ultrareligious homophobic
patriarchs abroad

Until it does, I'm going to persist in thinking that
its recent endorsements of “freedom” are hollow and meaningless.

DH: This answer from Michael
Berube is disappointing but not surprising. As I have already observed, the
left has become so intellectually lazy from years of talking to itself (and
“at” everyone else) that it has lost the ability to conduct an intellectual
argument with its opponents.

Berube has not answered any of the points made in
response to his original criticisms. He has failed to defend his claim in
particular that networks of the left to which he himself actively belongs include
Communists, Islamo-fascists, and supporters of terrorism, united by their
opposition to the American Great Satan. Nor has he attempted to explain why an
alliance of convenience is justifiable in these cases. And he certainly has
made no credible case for excluding Lynne Stewart’s terrorist friends from a
database of the left.

As if happens – to answer his final contribution to
this conversation – conservatives do dissociate themselves from the “torture
and murder of random Iraqis and Afghans – beginning with the President, who is
the author of America’s policy to promote freedom in the Middle East. If Berube
wants to discuss the question of whether torture of terrorists is justified
under any circumstances, perhaps we can organize a symposium on the subject.

Most conservatives opposed apartheid. A database on
conservatives should certainly include those who did not however. What is the
point of this challenge?

Who is Berube referring to when he refers to “violent,
ultrareligious, homophobic patriarchs” in the United States and abroad.
Conservatives are in a war with the “violent, ultrareligious, homophobic
patriarchs” of radical Islam. Progressives are either not in the war or still
attempting to make up their minds.

This grandstanding, initiated by Berube, is really out of place in
an intellectual discussion, and an unfortunate way to conclude this exchange.

FP: Prof. Berube and Mr. Horowitz, thank you for joining Frontpage's
discussion about DiscoverTheNetwork.org. We encourage our readers to stay
tuned for Part II of this series, in which Mr. Horowitz will continue this
dialogue with Prof. Robert Jensen, an associate professor in the School of Journalism at the University of
Texas at Austin.

[Editor’s note. This is a
continuation of the debate between Michael Berube and David Horowitz after the
close of part
one. For clarity, we have posted Horowitz’s responses to Berube’s original
objections to DiscoverTheNetwork.org and then Berube’s replies. The exchanges are
separated by asterisks.]

Horowitz: How does the database “blur the distinctions between
the mainstream left and the far far left” or “between the far left and liberals
such as Barack Obama?” The database clearly identifies five categories of
leftists:“Totalitarian Radicals,”
“Anti-American Radicals,” “Leftists,” “Moderate Leftists” and “Affective
Leftists.” How are the distinctions blurred if they are made? I notice that
Michael doesn't single out one statement that we have made about Barack Obama
in our profile of him that is either false, inappropriate or misleading. In
other words, we have actually made the distinctions he claims we haven’t.

Berube: The database makes “distinctions,” yes.But it insists nonetheless that everyone
listed in it is part of a “network.” Now, imagine that I compile a “network”
that links Olympia Snowe to Timothy McVeigh, or Bruce Willis to Augusto
Pinochet.Wouldn’t sane people see
something wrong with that?

Horowitz: Why would they? What you are objecting to is the very idea of a
database of the left which includes factions of the left however disparate.
This is not blurring distinctions, it is just saying that despite these
distinctions there is a justification for including all these people in a
database of the left. As I have already pointed out, a database on Communism
would include Stalin and also Trostky, even though they were mortal enemies and
ideological antagonists. I’m afraid I’m not very familiar with Timothy
McVeigh’s ideological perspectives, but assuming that he thought government was
oppressive and ought to be limited, and that Clinton administration’s
incineration of 80 mainly innocent individuals, mostly women and children was
wrong, placing him in a database with Republicans who also believe in limited
government makes sense. Including Olympia Snowe. I’m not sure Bruce Willis has
a political ideology, but let’s say that he is for lower taxes and the
promotion of a business economy, then why not have him in a database of the
right along with Pinochet who left Chile a prosperous, pro-business democracy
by the time he was through?

The point Berube seems to be arguing is that there are
so many points along the spectrum of the left and the spectrum of the right
that the very categories left and right have no meaning. This is an arguable
point of view but even adopting it does not mean that DiscoverTheNetwork blurs
distinctions. It does not.

***

Horowitz: What Michael and I seem to actually disagree about is whether
Barack Obama is a “liberal” or a “leftist.” My question to him would be: How
can anyone who supports racial preferences and income redistribution be
regarded as a “liberal?” But whatever conclusion one draws - whether Obama is a
leftist, a moderate leftist or a liberal ­- surely no reasonable person can
maintain that we have blurred distinctions when we have actually codified them.

Berube:
Here, David is straightforward about what’s at stake:he wants to move the rhetorical goalposts so far right that
anyone who supports affirmative action and progressive taxation is labeled a
“leftist.” All well and good:that’s
David's job, and I respect him for doing it so diligently.My job, then, is to push right back on those
goalposts, and to insist that David’s “Network” is the work of a far-right
ideologue.More than this, it’s the
work of a far-right ideologue who desperately needs to disavow the intimate
ideological connections between the Islamist far right and the American far
right.

Horowitz; Actually I have always been straightforward about what is at
stake. If Berube were to read my book The Politics of Bad Faith, he
would find that the introduction itself argues that what is referred to as
liberalism today is actually a variety of leftism, and for the reasons given in
the statement to which Berube is responding. His argument that this point of
view is itself “far right” is his opinion, but it has no historical basis. I
have often referred to the case of President John F. Kennedy and the New
Frontier as way of measuring how the political spectrum has been shifted to the
left by the arbiters of the cultural discourse. In the 1960s, Kennedy was
regarded as a liberal. Under the standards the left has been able to establish
in today’s culture he would be regarded as a Reaganite or (as Berube would
prefer) a member of the “far right.” Kennedy was a hawk on defense, a militant
anti-Communist, for a capital gains tax cut and a balanced budget (also weak on
civil rights). He appointed Republicans to his three top cabinet posts. He
launched the war against Communism in Vietnam. There is not a scintilla of
difference between Kennedy’s politics and Reagan’s.

Berube’s suggestion that the Islamist far right is
intimately ideologically connected to the American far right has this problem:
It is the far right (as defined by him and meaning pro-Bush conservatives like
myself) that has been in the forefront of the war against radical Islam and its
ideology, while it has been progressive leftists like him who have been at war
with the right’s war on radical Islam. Of course, he may mean the far
isolationist right of Pat Buchanan, and then he would be right, since Buchanan
has linked arms with Noam Chomsky in opposing the war that I support.

***

Horowitz: Berube’s comment about Barbra Streisand and Zarqawi is
unintelligible. To say that two people share some views - in this case
opposition to American policy in Iraq - is not the same as saying that any
critic of policy is an ally of Zarqawi.

Berube:
No, it is David’s comment about Barbra Streisand and Zarqawi that is
unintelligible.(The comment was
this:“It should be obvious that even
the otherwise innocent Barbra Streisand shares negative views of the Bush
Administration and its mission of liberating Iraq with anti-American jihadists
like the aforementioned [Abu Musab] Zarqawi, even though we are sure that she
deplores some of his methods.”) David’s remark clearly implies that if one
opposes the war in Iraq, one necessarily endorses “some views” espoused by
people who have no conceivable contact with any progressive/left American
project whatsoever­like Zarqawi.On the
contrary, part of our criticism of the war in Iraq is that the Bush
Administration bungled an opportunity to launch a strike against Zarqawi
because it was so obsessed with Saddam Hussein.

Horowitz: The shared view is that America is an imperialist, aggressive
power and therefore is in some way responsible for the 9/11 attacks on itself
and is suspect in its war in Iraq. Forgive me for not thinking that leftwing
criticism of the war in Iraq is based on a concern for more zealous prosecution
of the war against Zarqawi. In the first place, Zarqawi was in Iraq when we
attacked, which is one of the reasons we did attack: Saddam was part of the
international terrorist jihad against the United States. In the second place,
anyone reading the mountain of leftist commentary on the war on terror
(including the commentary posted on Barbra Streisand’s website) would instantly
notice that virtually none of the commentary is about ways to wage the war
against Zarqawi and other terrorists more efficiently, and that virtually all
of it is about the lies, deceptions, manipulations, bad motives, dishonesty,
lust for oil, imperial agendas, contempt for civil liberties, racial
persecution of Muslim captives of and by the United States.

***

Horowitz: [I do not equate criticism of Iraq policy with anti-Americanism
or treason.] As I have explained before (Why We Are In Iraq) not all
criticism is the same. Calling Bush Hitler is one kind of criticism, calling
him mistaken is quite another.

Berube:
Calling Bush Hitler is foolish.

Horowitz: We agree. You are somewhere between a Leftist and a Moderate
Leftist.

***

Horowitz: And there are many gradations in between. My comment was made to
answer the specific question:why are
these two people, Zarqawi and Streisand, in the same database? It is a question
the left really has to answer rather than me. How can people who claim to be
for women’s rights, gay rights, equality and freedom have taken sides in the
war with the terrorists in Iraq and come down on the anti-American end? I have
answered this question in a book, Unholy Alliance:Radical Islam and the American Left, that not a single
leftist has commented on.

Berube:
OK, then, consider this a comment.I’ve
read that book, and I endorse women’s rights, gay rights, and egalitarian
social justice in the following terms: I believe that all humans born have
equal entitlement to shelter, sustenance, health care, education, political
participation and representation, reciprocal recognition, and respect.So-called “leftists” who make exceptions to
this principle when it comes to Cuba and Cambodia are not my allies.But right-wing ideologues who invoke this
principle only in order to take cheap potshots at leftists are not even serious
interlocutors.David, let me know when
you're willing to endorse my conception of the left.In the meantime, I think the right has to explain why it’s apologized
for terror (in Oklahoma City) and torture (in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib) and
virulent racism (in South Africa).

Horowitz: I would so like to engage you (allow me to shift to the second
person in answering this question) in a discussion of how all humans born have
equal entitlement to shelter, sustenance, heath care and education – or more
particularly how you propose to pay for this? Is a right a claim on some else’s
labor from birth? I’m already supporting enough people thank you. Lenin, Castro
and other Marxists tried this formula and made billions of people miserable and
poor. I’m glad you take your distance from leftists who support Cuban and
Cambodian totalitarians. As I said you are somewhere between a Leftist and a
Moderate Leftist in our political taxonomy. I don’t speak for the right (and
you have certainly misrepresented the right in saying that it has in any
blanket way apologized for terror in Oklahoma City, torture in Abu Ghraib or
virulent racism in South Africa). In any case you have not answered the
question, which is why the left put itself on the line to defend the Saddam
regime from the British and American retribution it so richly deserved, and why
the left which claims to support e.g., women’s rights has opposed the Bush Administration’s
successful efforts to liberate 20 million Muslim women in Afghanistan and Iraq.

***

Horowitz: I have argued that the left today is largely defined by its
oppositions, first to the United States and then to Israel. I have even posted a
lengthy analysis of the left's history from 1945 to the present that was
written by an academic leftist for the socialist magazine Dissent that
comes to exactly the same conclusions.I would welcome in these pages a leftist response to these conclusions.
So far I have not seen any.

The reason why the left’s behavior after 9/11 suggests
that a watershed has been passed in the development of the left itself can be
understood by referring to the left’s anti-war effort over America's
intervention in Vietnam some forty years ago.

In the Vietnam War the United States was supporting a
dictatorship in South Vietnam on the grounds that the dictatorship was
anti-Communist. “New Leftists” who believed by and large that Communism was a
flawed attempt to create societies governed by the principles of equality and
justice had an argument (whether one considers it plausible or not) for
opposing the United States defense of the South Vietnamese regime. Perhaps (so
they reasoned) a victory for the guerrilla forces of the National Liberation
Front of South Vietnam would mean the emergence of a society that honored the
principles of equality and justice. This an was incentive to see that America
was defeated. And this indeed is the delusional vision that motivated people
like Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda other anti-war activists.

Berube:
Millions of Americans opposed that war not because they desired an NLF victory,
but because they feared ­- in terms that the late George Kennan would surely understand
-­ that the US war in Vietnam would lead us to become more, rather than less,
like our enemies who were fighting proxy wars around the globe.And millions of Americans opposed that war
on the pragmatic ground that it was not, in fact, critical to the outcome of
the Cold War.As I’ve said to you
before, David, in one respect the antiwar left has been pretty clearly
vindicated on the subject of Vietnam:that war was not, after all, crucial for U.S. national security or to
the fate of the free world.We could
have walked away in 1954 or 1964 instead of 1975, and the Berlin Wall would
still have come down in 1989, the Soviet Union would still have collapsed in
1991.And there would be 58,000 more
Americans - and roughly a million more Vietnamese - around to watch it happen.

It is true that some New Leftists, in the “network”
you once inhabited, were NLF supporters.Had I been 10 or 20 years older at the time, I would have criticized
them.

Horowitz: Millions of Americans may have eventually opposed the war in
Vietnam for the reasons you describe. But we were talking about the New Left,
which launched the movement against the war in Vietnam in 1962 (I should know
because I helped to organize the first anti-Vietnam demonstration, which was staged
in Berkeley in June of that year). The two national anti-Vietnam organizations
that mobilized all the major demonstrations against the war were run by the
Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party respectively. Their slogans
were Bring The Troops Home Now (which was designed to ensure a Communist
victory) and Bring the War Home (which is self-explanatory).The left did not care one hoot about
America’s national security and this was not a factor in any leftist’s critique
of the war. The left was only vindicated if it willed the slaughter of 2 and a
half million Cambodians and Vietnamese by the Communists after America was
forced to leave and the destruction of both countries.

***

Horowitz: But in Iraq, America set out to overthrow a dictatorship not
defend one. What could saving Saddam Hussein -- which was the practical goal of
the anti-war left - mean but more corpses shoveled into mass graves, more human
beings stuffed into plastic shredders and more terror generally for the Iraqi
people? In Iraq the United States overthrew a monster regime, and liberated
women and Iraq’s minorities ­- and the left did everything in its power to
prevent this.

Berube:
I am glad that Saddam has been captured.I wish that it could have happened in a way that did not so dramatically
compromise the United States’ standing in world affairs ­- and this is not a
trivial matter, because the US’ standing in world affairs will set the
conditions for our ability to act effectively against al-Qaeda in the future. But
has this war really liberated women in Iraq? David, you’d be wise to be more
circumspect about this; you might wind up being disappointed by your new
Shi’ite friends.And you might do well
to read more deeply in the history of Iraq since 1920.

In the meantime, I salute all the American leftists
who opposed Saddam throughout the 1980s, when Reagan and Rumsfeld were making
their marriages of convenience in the face of the Iranian Revolution.

Horowitz: I’m glad you’re glad that Saddam has been captured (second
person again). But you and your political allies did nothing to help the Bush
Administration capture him and everything possible to keep him in power, so I’m
not quite sure how you expect the rest of us to take this. Even now you can’t
bring yourself to concede the remarkably positive developments that Bush and
Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Rice have brought about in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Libya, Lebanon, and the broader Middle East.

Your incredibly facile references to America’s desperate
efforts in the 1980s to prevent either the radical Islamic state of Iran or the
fascist state of Iraq from dominating the Gulf shows how removed you are from
actually being concerned about American policy, America’s standing in the world
or the terrible responsibilities that have been placed on its government. We
tilted towards Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war to prevent Iran -- a nation four times
the size of Iraq whose leaders had sworn “death to America” -- from overrunning
Iraq, and dominating the entire Gulf region and with it the energy lifeline of
Europe and the West. If you don’t like balance of power politics, why do you
express such concern about the opinion of European states, who are wedded to
this principle of realpolitik and have shown themselves to have no particular
commitment to moral principles like the defense of democracy or the advance of
freedom?

***

Horowitz: Some leftists actively support what they call the Iraqi
“resistance,” led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Others like Barbra Streisand and
Michael Berube don’t like Zarqawi or Saddam but they seem to fear George Bush
even more. More importantly they have put their political bodies on the line
first to obstruct America’s war of liberation and save Saddam’s oppressive
regime, and then to denigrate and undermine America’s post-war effort to
consolidate its victory, an effort which if successful would allow Zarqawi to
emerge as the ruling power in Iraq.

Berube:
This is beyond nonsense.As a supporter
of the US-led overthrow of the Taliban and as a liberal-progressive opponent of
al-Qaeda, I opposed the war in Iraq because I believed that it would not
advance our goals of marginalizing and defeating Islamist extremism.And I argued that it was foolish for Bush to
ignore Zarqawi in his drive to invade Iraq.

I believe that American military and intelligence
resources should have been deployed to capture bin Laden and Zarqawi.David offers apologies for the policies that
have left both of them free men ­- and then he impugns my patriotism.You’ll forgive me if I find this hard to
believe.

Horowitz: Looking at my comment, I do not see any reference to Afghanistan
or the Taliban. If you really opposed the war in Iraq because you thought it
would not advance the goals of marginalizing and defeating Islamist extremism,
now is the time to admit you were wrong. Our liberation of Iraq resulted in an
election in which 70% of the Iraqi people voted against terrorism and our
efforts have started a wave of anti-terrorist and democratic movement in the
Middle East from Baghdad to Cairo.

In case you didn’t notice, Bin Laden has been
politically and militarily dead since U.S. forces entered Iraq. His big
terrorist act against the 2004 elections was to send a video to Al-Jazeera. That’s
because Bush and Rumsfeld’s war has shredded his organization and put him on
the run Zarqawi is only in slightly better shape. He declared war on the
elections in Iraq – and lost. Time to admit you were wrong, that is if you want
to retain any credibility in these matters. BTW: Where did I impugn your
patriotism?

* **

Horowitz: So it's not really myself and the DiscoverTheNetwork team who
have to defend our decision to include Zarqawi and Streisand in the broad
networks that link disparate elements of the left. Rather it’s leftists like
yourself who have to explain to us why you are engaging in a political course
of action which if successful would strengthen the global Islamic jihad and its
misogynist, homophobic and reactionary agendas.

Berube:
No, I’ve made it quite clear, time and time again, that I oppose violent,
ultrareligious patriarchy at home and abroad.Let me know when you're willing to disavow misogynist, homophobic and
reactionary forces in the US.

Horowitz: Words, Michael. Your political actions – opposition to the war to
liberate Iraq, refusal to acknowledge your mistake and give Bush the support he
needs in the war to protect the fledgling democracy in Iraq – speak louder,
much louder, than your words. As for my deeds in the U.S. my record in opposing
the abuse of women (I guess this is what you mean) and in defending the civil
rights of gay Americans is a matter of record. And of course I oppose the
reactionary left, which I guess is not what you mean.

***

[Berube: Then there’s a brief exchange in which
I mention David’s Salon essay in defense of Pinochet; FrontPage kept that part
of the debate intact.And then they ran
David’s reply in full - it runs another six paragraphs after the one below - while
cutting my three-paragraph response.]

Horowitz: Well of course I specifically did not defend Pinochet in the
article he refers to; in fact I specifically criticized Pinochet. What I did
that upset Michael was to point out that Pinochet left his country prosperous
and democratic (he voluntarily submitted to a referendum which he lost) and
contrasted this to the fact that Castro is the longest surviving dictator in
the world and has made his country dramatically poorer than it was when he took
power. For this Michael called me a Nazi (to be precise he said he couldn’t
wait for my next article defending the Third Reich). Now that’s what I call
blurring distinctions Michael, and I have to say it is pretty much a staple of
the arguments of the left.

Berube:
OK, it’s time to draw some distinctions ­- at last!I did not call David a Nazi ­- though I’ve now heard from two
sources that he's made this claim on his tours through our nation’s college
campuses.But I certainly did argue
that all of David's arguments in favor of Pinochet (whom, in all fairness, he
did “criticize,” in the course of arguing that Pinochet had been good for
Chile) could be made a fortiori for Hitler, who certainly improved the
German economy and ­- unlike Pinochet ­- was actually elected to office.

But what David refuses to acknowledge here is that I
have criticized Castro again and again ­- not only in the 1990s, but much more
recently, when, at the outset of Gulf War II, Fidel imprisoned 80 dissenters
and executed three people who’d tried to hijack a ferry to the US.The contrast really couldn't be
clearer:I criticize dictators on my
left, and David offers half-hearted “criticisms” of a right-wing torturer who
“left his country prosperous and democratic.”

I have no problem with the disavowal of extremists to
my left; I encourage David to disavow extremists on the right.Break the links between your network and
Pinochet’s ­- and the links between your network and Gary Bauer’s or Randall
Terry’s.Anytime in the next few months
would be fine.

Horowitz: I think I just said you did not call me a Nazi, merely an
apologist for the next Third Reich. I don’t know who your informants are but I
don’t remember referring to you on my college speaking tours. Whatever. The
case I made was that the average Chilean was better off because of Pinochet
while the average Cuban was worse off because of Castro. Hitler is not
comparable because Hitler, well, was Hitler. He also did not hold a referendum
creating a democracy and ending his rule, and revitalized the German economy
only by making it a war machine, which is not what Pinochet did. I don’t know
what all this breast-beating about Castro is, since I never suggested you were
a Castro supporter – did I? I don’t know what links you’re talking about re:
Pinochet. I have publicly and more than once taken on Gary Bauer specifically
and members of the Christian right who are at war with gays (you can look up
the articles in my archives) and for ten years I have been saying that Randall
Terry reminds of everything I detest in the left, in particular its arrogance
and self-righteousness and disregard for other people’s rights.

This is the second part in a series of debates with three
leftists about how the left is defined in DiscoverTheNetwork.org. To see the
first part with Michael Berube, click
here. We hope this dialogue
will be the foundation for a lengthy series of conversations with leftists
about radicalism, leftism, liberalism and conservatism.

Part II: Prof. Robert Jensen and David Horowitz

FP:Today
we have the pleasure of being joined by David Horowitz and Robert Jensen, an associate professor in the School of Journalism at the University
of Texas at Austin. He styles himself a "critic of the U.S. empire"
and is a member of the board of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center.

Prof. Jensen, thank you for visiting us at Frontpage
Magazine. So what’s your view of DiscoverThe Network? Do you, like
Professor Berube, distance yourself from that part of the far Left that has
endorsed radical Islam because, as Prof. Berube notes, it “forfeits its moral
authority to oppose totalitarianism, torture, and terrorism?”

Jensen: I agree with Prof. Berube’s
basic point about the web site’s blurring of important distinctions between
centrists, liberals and leftists. The labels and individuals listed on the site
correspond to no sensible political categories I can imagine. Because the site
is literally incoherent, I assume it was constructed for propaganda purposes.
It’s worth noting that if you asked people with even minimal political
knowledge and experience in any other part of the world to evaluate the site,
you would have to wait quite some time for the laughter to subside -- they
would assume the site is a joke. Most everywhere else in the world, left ideas
are recognized as an important part of the political mix. The narrowness of the
political spectrum in the mainstream of U.S. politics is striking.

Let’s take the category of “anti-American radicals.” This is
simply a rejection of any meaningful conception of democracy. I’ve made the
point before, as have many others: To accuse someone who criticizes U.S. policy
of being “anti-American” is to reject any meaningful role for citizens in a
democracy. For example, if I believe the U.S. invasion of Iraq was unlawful and
immoral, should I simply shut up and capitulate to the forces that pressed for
war? To label opposition to the policies of the powerful as “anti-American,”
displays incredible contempt for democracy. It’s hard to take seriously any
project that uses such terms.

On the question of radical Islam: I reject the pre-modern
fundamentalist strains of any religion, be it Christian, Jewish, Hindu, or
Islamic. I think all such non-rational philosophies are a threat to secular
democratic government. I also recognize the right of people to resist illegal
foreign occupation. Various groups in Iraq are exercising that right. I don’t
think recognition of that right requires me to endorse the politics of any
particular groups engaged in that resistance nor endorse all their tactics. I
assume people can see the distinction. I also assume that people realize they
have a moral and political responsibility to reject the illegal and immoral
actions of their own government.

FP: Mr. Horowitz?

Horowitz: Robert Jensen really doesn’t
like the idea of a database of the left in the first place, and in this I think
he reflects what all leftists who have reacted to the site feel. They don’t
want a light shined on their activities, agendas, and destructive achievements.
They don’t want to be accountable for what they have done and for who they are.
That’s why they don’t like DiscoverTheNetwork.org. The refusal of the left to
be accountable for its deeds is a principal theme of a book Peter Collier and I
wrote about the New Left that we played a role in, and that we titled, Destructive
Generation. The leftists we wrote about did not want to make a balance sheet
of what they had done, and did not want to consider how others who did not
share their fantasies of a future redemption might view their achievements.

Robert Jensen says we blur distinctions between centrists,
liberals and leftists, even though our database is not about centrists and
liberals, except insofar as they enter into coalitions with or lend their
support to the left. From Jensen’s point of view, which is actually situated at
the far left end of the political spectrum, we have confused “centrists” and
“liberals” with leftists in compiling DiscoverTheNetwork. In our view we have
not. It would be interesting to see a comparable spectrum organized by Jensen,
but there is no reason why our view of the spectrum should agree with his.

Jensen doesn’t like our specific categories either. What he really
doesn’t like is the category “anti-American radical.” He probably doesn’t like
the category “totalitarian radical” either but can’t find a way to deconstruct
it.

Jensen, who has prematurely celebrated America’s “defeat” in Iraq
in a statement after the battle of Fallujah, calls the very use of the term
“anti-American” illegitimate. “To accuse someone who criticizes U.S. policy of
being ‘anti-American’ is to reject any meaningful role for citizens in a
democracy.” But of course the site does not accuse anyone who criticizes U.S.
policy of being “anti-American.” If it did, there would be five categories of
leftists ranging from “Totalitarian Radical” to “Moderate Left” and “Affective
Left.” Instead there would be only one category in the site – “Anti-American
Radical” -- since everyone in the database, in all categories, is critical –
and in fact very critical -- of U.S. policy. Since we do not regard all critics
of US policy as immoral we have taken the pains to make five categories to
describe these critics, only one of which is defined as “anti-American” –
although leftists who qualify as totalitarian radicals would also qualify as
anti-American. Jensen is unfortunately typical of radical critics of DiscoverTheNetwork
who simply ignore what we have actually written as though ignorance (or more
properly, denial) is actually a form of argument.It is not.

Is “anti-American” a meaningful category? In Europe and elsewhere
“anti-American” has actually been a staple description of a political attitude
for half a century or more, and is employed not just by conservatives. Why is
the idea of anti-group prejudice so difficult for Jensen to comprehend,
particularly since it is a core theme of leftwing politics? Leftists like
Jensen have no trouble in describing conservatives as anti-Arab, or anti-black,
or anti-gay. So why should the idea of someone being “anti-American” be so
incomprehensible?

Ward Churchill and Noam Chomsky, two well-known figures on the left,
regard the United States as comparable to (or even worse than) Hitler Germany.
Throughout his career and in many articles and books, Churchill has described
America as a genocidal nation. That is why he referred to the innocent victims
of 9/11 as “little Eichmanns,” since in conducting the business of America they
were in his view also conducting genocide against innocent victims of American
capitalism around the world. In many books and pontifications, Noam Chomsky has
articulated a parallel judgment on American malevolence. Chomsky’s last book, Hegemony
or Survival, is dedicated to the proposition that America is a threat to
the survival of the planet.

In my opinion and that of DiscoverTheNetwork, these extreme views
qualify as “anti-American.” They are not merely critical of an aspect of
American policy but of America in its very constitution and structure. They
condemn America in its essence. If America defends dictators, America is wrong;
if America overthrows dictators it is wrong. Even when America does right, it
does right for the wrong reason. This is a viewpoint reasonably described as
“anti-American.” Jensen himself shares this perspective. To him America is an
oppressive empire, which for the good of mankind should be defeated in Iraq. Jensen
doesn’t conceal what he thinks. He just doesn’t want anyone to identify his
extreme and negative views of America and its purposes for what they are.

Jensen: Mr. Horowitz knows perfectly
well that I am not afraid of having attention focused on left ideas and
political activity. I post all my writing on the web and spend countless hours
trying to draw attention to left politics. I have never turned down an
invitation to speak or debate in public. In fact, when I have tried to engage
right-wing professors on my campus to foster such debate, I’ve been rebuffed.
And when right-wing groups have posted their views on my activities (such as a
“professor watch list” at my university) I have not only supported their right
to do it, but praised them for being engaged politically, while critiquing some
of the claims they made. Mr. Horowitz knows perfectly well that I'm not afraid
of public engagement but am simply critiquing his position.

Yes, perhaps he and I would describe the political spectrum in
different ways. But he makes no attempt to defend the way in which his web site
collapses the distinction between center, liberal and left. I consider the term
“left” to mark a consistent critique of illegitimate structures of authority
and concentrations of power. Centrists and liberals, who typically endorse
capitalism and state power, have a very different politics than leftists.

Mr. Horowitz seems confused about the difference between labeling
a position anti-gay and anti-American. If someone says, ”I think gay people are
sick,” it seems honest to call that anti-gay. It is an expression of contempt
for gay people. If I say, “I think the U.S. attack on Iraq was illegal” or if I
point to features of corporate capitalism and state power that I think harm
people, I am critiquing a policy, systems, or institutions. I am not condemning
America but am trying to help create a more just world. If democracy is a
meaningful term, then no one policy, system, or institution is above critique.
So, I agree that it is accurate to call me anti-war or anti-capitalist, but not
anti-American.

Churchill and Chomsky can easily defend their own views, but it is
clear from the historical record that the United States is based on an act of
genocide against indigenous people. It seems minimally honest to recognize the
genocidal history of the United States. Is the United States a threat to the
survival of the planet? Given the reckless and barbaric fashion in which U.S.
leaders (Republican and Democrat alike) have exercised that power -- especially
since the end of World War II -- calling the United States a threat seems
justified to me. As the United States pursues a new generation of nuclear
weapons and presses to militarize space, trying to highlight that threat seems
an obligation of citizenship.

Horowitz: Jensen apparently doesn’t want
to understand the meaning of the words I have written. I didn’t write that he
was unhappy with being described as a leftist. He is unhappy at being described
as an “Anti-American Radical,” which is a very precise description of his point
view. He regards America as imperialist, racist, oppressive, and genocidal
throughout its history -- a reactionary power, whose social and economic
structures need to be deconstructed, destroyed and replaced by a socialist
state. He regards America not as a democracy in which the people are sovereign
but as a hierarchy in which a ruling class deceives and manipulates a pliant
public to carry on its predatory agendas. That’s why he regards his critique as
a critique of power and not critique of the American people and their choices.
That is why he regards a war that was sanctioned by a vote of the people
(2004), by both parties in Congress (2002) and by UN resolution 1441, as
“illegal” and illegitimate. People who do not accept the legitimacy of the
democratic process are self-declared outlaws who have committed themselves to
war against the American system. They are not just opponents of the party in
power, they are opponents of the constitutional system that put them in power.
They are anti-American.

No matter times he repeats the claim, DiscoverTheNetwork does not
“collapse the distinction between center, liberal and left.” If Professor
Jensen will go to the “Issues” module on DiscoverTheNetwork and click on
“Progressivism” or “Liberalism,” he will find ample discussion of the left and
its relation to liberalism. The individual and group profiles featured on
DiscoverTheNetwork are careful to preserve these distinctions as well.

In denying that he is anti-American, Professor Jensen is just
seeking to avoid the plain meaning of his positions. He has publicly wished for
America’s defeat in Iraq. He has described the liberation of Iraq as an
imperialist occupation. He has supported political forces that are at war with
America and that regard America as the “Great Satan” – the fount of evil in the
world. He has rejected the American system – not a particular policy but the
entire constitutional system that creates American policies. That is what
America is. To oppose what America is – in its very essence – is to be
anti-American. At least that’s how we define it on DiscoverTheNetwork.org

And of course this is being kind to Professor Jensen. To describe
America as a genocidal nation -- a nation that sets out to exterminate peoples
-- is a form of political insanity. Professor Jensen inhabits an alternate
reality conditioned by a preposterous fantasy that there is a perfect future
waiting out there for people filled with hate against the imperfect country we
all inhabit to create. But in order create this future perfection they must
first destroy the imperfect present. Therefore they are willing to join forces
with and encourage truly genocidal terrorists like Osama bin Laden and Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi in their war against America and the West.

This treason to one’s own country has a long and dishonorable
history. It is described under the category “Fifth Column” in the Issues module
on DiscoverTheNetwork.org

FP: Prof.Robert Jensen and
Mr. Horowitz, thank you for joining Frontpage's discussion about
DiscoverTheNetwork.org. We encourage our readers to stay tuned for Part
III of this series, in which Mr. Horowitz will continue this dialogue with
Timothy Burke, whoblogs
on Easily Distracted
and is an assistant professor in the Dept. of History at Swarthmore College.

This is the third in
our series of conversations with leftists about the nature of the left and how
it is portrayed on DiscoverTheNetwork.org. Prof. Michael Bérubé joined us for
the first round in sectionsOne and Two and Prof. Robert Jensen joined us in the
second round.

For this final
round, we are joined by Timothy Burke, who blogs on Easily Distracted and is an
assistant professor in the Dept. of History at Swarthmore
College. He specializes in cultural history with a particular interest in
popular culture in America, modern imperialism and the history of Africa. His
most recent book, Saturday Morning Fever (1999),
co-authored with his brother, Kevin Burke, explores American cartoon culture
and its influence on Generation X.

*

FP: Prof. Timothy Burke and David
Horowitz, welcome to the third and final part of our series on
DiscoverTheNetwork.org. Prof. Burke, let me begin with you. What is your
assessment of DiscoverTheNetwork? And can you kindly also tell us where you
personally stand on members of the left who ally themselves with the enemy in
our terror war?

Burke: On DiscoverTheNetwork, some
of my objections have already been ably described by my colleagues. Let me
mention a few of my greatest concerns.

First, I think the entire project has an almost non-existent sense
of what represents a “linkage” between two separate individuals. This is the
bread and butter art of intellectual or political history, the major question
in the study of social networks. What is minimally needed to claim a serious or
substantial connection between two people in terms of ideas they share,
institutional projects they are both contributing to, influences they exert on
one another? Whether you’re talking about a connection across time (some
individual in the past influencing some individual at a later time) or space
(some individual in one society or community influencing another), you have to
define what you regard as a meaningful connection, stick to that definition,
and provide evidence of it.

DiscoverTheNetwork is justifiably made fun of not for ideological
reasons but because it so miserably fails to make it out of the starting gate
in this regard. DiscoverTheNetwork operates with an implicit definition of
“linkage” that makes allows arbitrary assertions of connections between anyone
who annoys its creators. If taken seriously, it would be hard to disallow any
connection proposed: you could connect Lynne Stewart to Mayor Bloomberg or Noam
Chomsky to Milton Friedman using the idea of linkage operating within the
project. It’s rather like the “Kevin Bacon game,” only elevated to a high level
of seriousness and polemical aggression.

So first things first. If the project is meant to have any gravity
or legitimacy at all, its concept of linkage or connection has to be defined
specifically and tightly and that definition has to be binding on its users.
For a respectable neo-conservative example, see Paul Berman’s Terror and
Liberalism. Though I disagree strongly with some of the more speculative
and far-reaching linkages and conclusions that Berman draws, and the misuse of
his arguments by many readers, Berman nevertheless invests a serious amount of
work on close textual readings of the written work of figures who interest him
and equally serious effort in tracing their actual institutional movements,
careers and historical contexts. If that sounds like a lot of work, too bad:
it’s the minimal requirement to avoid being a scurrilous effort to carelessly
stain people's reputations.

Second. I think DiscoverTheNetwork operates with a very careless,
historically ungrounded, painfully loose idea of “the Left.” We’re all careless
occasionally in this respect, often equally in describing “the Right” or
“conservatism.” These are short-hand phrases, and they usually obscure far more
than they reveal. DiscoverTheNetwork’s definition of “the Left” effaces some
distinctions between different individuals, projects and histories that are
vitally important. It often ends up amalgamating or compressing people whose
political or intellectual commitments have frequently made them antagonists on
very fundamental levels, who inherit liberal or left (or even centrist)
traditions which diverged generations ago or even traditions which have never
had any meaningful relation to one another. There isn’t any definition of the
“left” here that has content: a term which means anything means nothing. What
is the definition of “left” that makes Bill Clinton a leftist? If it’s
something like “believes in the positive power of government to intervene in
society,” not only is that uselessly general, it is a definition that if
honestly applied would make George W. Bush a “moderate leftist” as well.

On the last question that Jamie asks – “where [do] you personally
stand on members of the left who ally themselves with the enemy in our war on
terror? -- it all comes down to specifics: what is meant by “ally,” who are
“the enemy,” and which “terror war? In a case where those specifics are in
hand, I certainly can say that I reject such alliances, and I could care less
whether those making them are “Left” or “Right;” that is an irrelevant part of
the question. To my mind, the misconduct of American soldiers in Abu Ghraib and
the clumsy response to that misconduct at the highest levels of the Bush
Administration has actively sabotaged the global struggle against illiberal or
fundamentalist extremism. That is as much an issue to me as the evasions and
double-standard arguments of someone like Michael Moore or Noam Chomsky's
compression of moral crisis in the global system to American misconduct.

But in either case -- the neo-conservative mishandling of the war
against terror or the evasiveness of certain extremely particular and confined
traditions of thought on the left -- I think it would be wrong to use the term
“ally.” I think finding Americans (or for that matter citizens of other
countries) who are authentically and legitimately describable as “allies” of
terrorism is actually exceptionally difficult. It’s a serious charge, that
word, and it deserves to be made seriously, rather than used with appalling
casualness to describe arguments or views with which one disagrees, however
passionate that disagreement might be. Dissent, from both right and left, is
patriotic. It’s what we're supposed to be defending in this conflict.

Horowitz: Professor Burke begins with
a series of insults – as seems to be the norm for leftists, particularly when
discussing issues with conservatives whose work they have not read. But
underneath the unearned scorn poured forth in Professor Burke’s first two
paragraphs lies an interesting point, in fact the only interesting point that
has surfaced in the three conversations so far.

If I could rephrase this point for Professor Burke, it would be
that DiscoverTheNetwork doesn’t articulate the rationale for the linkages it
makes on the site in a fashion explicit enough to make clear to him and
leftists like him what the rationale might be for its construction. (I notice I
have received no such critiques of the linkages on DiscoverTheNetwork from conservatives
of whatever persuasion. Nor have any liberals for that matter found the
categories in the site suspect let alone risible.) In Professor Burke’s view –
respectfully rephrased -- DiscoverTheNetwork identifies networks but doesn’t
explain why anyone who shares the assumptions and prejudices of the left should
take them seriously.

Before addressing this point, I would like to step back and
explain why it did not occur to me in the first place that an elaborately
articulated rationale for the site would be required (although I did actually
provide several articles in the base which would serve that function but which
none of my critics seems to have read).

Our political culture generally (and our leftwing culture in
particular), has no difficulty identifying an extraordinary range of differing
and even opposing viewpoints as belonging to the political right. Libertarians
and authoritarians, secularists and fundamentalists, interventionists and
anti-interventionists, anti-immigrationists and pro-immigrationists, free
traders and anti-free traders, racists and anti-racists,– all are casually and unthinkingly and with
no attendant controversy lumped together as the “political right” by leftists
like Timothy Burke. The reason there is no attendant controversy is that the
arbiters of the culture -- the universities and the reflective media (major
metropolitan newspapers, magazines and the public broadcasting networks) are so
firmly and unthinkingly in the hands of the left that there is no one to raise
the problem outside the conservative universe itself.

As a result this lumping of all conservatives as “right-wingers”
takes place unchallenged despite the fact that there is at least as much
divergence among groups and individuals that are today called conservative as
there is among the individuals and groups called “left” in DiscoverTheNetwork.

On the other hand, confronted by the left’s habitual lumping and
labeling of all conservatives as right-wingers and not infrequently including in
this category, misogynists, racists and homophobes (e.g. Michael Berube’s
unsubstantiated accusations in this discussion) conservatives generally do not
resort to ridicule in an effort to dismiss their intellectual opponents out of
hand and deny them a place at the table of civilized discourse. Conservatives
are in fact quite passive in their acceptance of the discordant and ill-fitting
labels that are thrust on them. Perhaps that’s what makes them conservative.
They recognize that our knowledge of and ability to describe such complexities
are imperfect and will probably remain so. While this imperfection prevails, we
have to have descriptive terms for groups that align in clear patterns on
opposite sides of many vital issues.By
contrast, leftists are people who are unhappy with the real world. They accept
nothing and want everything. Consequently they are destined to be as frustrated
and unsatisfied with websites like DiscoverTheNetwork as they are with life
itself.

As a late blooming conservative who finally came to accept the
imperfections of this world, I presumed in designing DiscoverTheNetwork that it
was better to show than to tell; better to demonstrate the network itself
rather than attempt the impossible task of fully explaining it – that is, of
providing an intellectual structure that would completely and satisfactorily
locate every individual and organization along a clearly defined political
spectrum. To Timothy Burke (and Michael Berube and Robert Jensen) I would say,
take a deep breath and look at how you and your political comrades talk about
the right, and then look again at your complaints about how conservatives talk
about the left in sites like DiscoverTheNetwork.

When you have done this, you will find that we are reasonably
careful about making linkages within the site, far more so than any comparable
leftist site I am aware of. People are associated in DiscoverTheNetwork if they
belong to the same organizations or join common coalitions or share funding
sources and ascribe to common agendas. That is the way the database relates
them and that is probably the way most of them relate to each other. One reason
that we don’t relate them exclusively by commitment to a unifying ideology is
that the left hasn’t had a coherent unifying ideology since the death of
Stalinism in 1956. In a political career that stretches over more than half a
century, I have found that most people involved in politics are not deep or
even careful thinkers about the whys and wherefore of the issues and causes that
bring them together. This being the case, what is important for the analyst is
the fact that they are indeed brought together, and that over time the lines
along which they are brought together are etched deep into their identities
until eventually it becomes unthinkable for them to cross those lines or to
leave the group they have joined.

Most people on the left, for example, embrace positions in advance
of understanding either their rationale or implications, or attempting to
square them with their progressive theories. How otherwise explain
“compassionate” progressives who are opposed to the death penalty for serial
killers of small children supporting the court-ordered killing of Terry
Schiavo, a severely handicapped individual who committed no crime? How do we
explain the determination of progressives to defend a dictator, and oppressor
of women, gays and minorities, like Saddam Hussein?

To answer Professor Burke’s specific question about the
characterization of Bill Clinton as a “Moderate Leftist” in the database, this
label is not applied exclusively or even mainly as a result of his policies or
ideas but because of his core associations, alliances and dependencies, and the
coalitions that brought him to power. His policies and ideas might very well be
described as centrist, though his administration certainly aspired to be more
left than it was, and would have been so if it had not been checked by a
conservative Congress. Welfare reform was a Republican policy that he signed
onto to remain in power; he was not committed in anyway to “ending welfare as
we know it” even though that was what he said. Reasonable people may disagree
about defining Clinton as a Moderate Leftist because of his associations and
political allegiances. But our reasons for including him in the database were
not lacking in seriousness, nor would anyone approaching the base with
appropriate respect miss this fact.

Professor Burke’s complaint that I did not provide a rationale for
the database simply ignores what I have actually written (something I have had
to grow used to when dealing with critics from the left). I launched the site
with a long explanatory article called “What This Site Is About,” which
includes some discussion of the “linkages” which Professor Burke claims are
missing. I responded to the initial criticism of the site by immediately
writing two lengthy essays called “Defining the Left” and “Defining the Left
Further,” which Professor Burke has also ignored but which would have provided
him with the answers he appears to be looking for. I invite him to review these
explanations and come at me again.

I also invite him to look at my book Unholy Alliance: Radical
Islam and the American Left, which is the fruit of fifty years spent either
as an activist in the left or studying the left, and which is an extensive
effort to define the left as well. The text of Unholy Alliance is in
fact the rationale for the construction of the DiscoverTheNetwork site, and in
particular the aspect of the site – the inclusion of Islamic radicals – that so
distresses its leftwing critics. Professor Burke can also refer to the Issues
module of the site and the sections called “Liberalism” and “Progressivism (The
Left)” on which we posted (from day one) substantive essays by Barry Loberfeld
on this subject which were commissioned especially for the site. He can also
find there my article “The Meaning of Left and Right,” which is a chapter from The
Politics of Bad Faith.

So in response to Burke’s jibes, I would respond: What the left is
laughing at is its own intellectual laziness. It is so used to talking to
itself and not listening to anyone else that it has forgotten how to make an
argument or recognize when there is one to which it needs to reply.
DiscoverTheNetwork is not only the product of years of work say but decades of
reflection – and these reflections have been in print and available for more
than a very long time.

Professor Burke refers to Paul Berman’s fine book Terror and
Liberalism as an example of the kind of analysis and definition that takes
hard work and that I should have done. In fact, I have done it and, if I may
indulge myself a little, far more systematically and thoroughly. I have done it
in Destructive Generation, in Radical Son, in The Politics of
Bad Faith, in Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes, in Left
Illusions and in Unholy Alliance. And I am not alone in this work.
Leszek Kolakowski, Francois Furet, Thomas Sowell, Ludwig Von Mises, Friedrich
von Hayek, Eric Vogelein, Paul Hollander, Jacob Talmon, Guenter Lewy and many
other writers of whom Professor Burke is apparently ignorant, have studied the
left and described the linkages that inform the construction of
DiscoverTheNetwork.org. The problem Professor Burke has encountered is not of
our making. It is a product of the academic world he inhabits where the
writings and intellectual traditions of conservatives are actively and
pervasively suppressed.

Finally, I am amused (but Paul Berman will not be) by Burke’s
reference to Berman as a “neo-conservative.” Berman is someone I have known for
twenty years. He is a passionate socialist and a ferociously self-identified
leftist, who despises conservatives like myself. The only thing
“neo-conservative” about Paul Berman is his grudging but welcome support for
the war on terror.

FP: Professor Burke?

Burke: It’s fair for David to
challenge me to read the work that he says forms the background of
DiscovertheNetwork, and I’ll take up that challenge with an open mind.

However, if David views DiscovertheNetwork as a fair if simplified
extraction from that work, there are really only two possibilities. First, that
DiscovertheNetwork is so simplified as a representation of his more detailed
arguments that it does his lengthier work a terrible injustice. If so, my
straightforward suggestion would be to drop DiscovertheNetwork altogether.
There is a point at which brevity is no longer the soul of wit, but instead
becomes an axe which mutilates an argument or empirical finding
indiscriminately. Simplification for the purpose of ready communication does
not just involve dropping out definitions, argumentation, content: it involves
changing the nature and form of the claims that one makes. If you’re writing a
short one-volume history of the world intended for a general audience, you
can’t say when challenged that somewhere in a three-page summary of the history
of India prior to 1800 you’re still carrying out a detailed analysis of the
reign of Chandragupta I, that it’s implicit. At that level of analysis, you don’t
just lose details, but the form of the argument has to change. Trying just to
compress the details into the sketch never makes for a pretty picture.

This assumes that the cartoonish distortion evident in
DiscovertheNetwork is an unfair representation of the detailed argument that
David feels he has made elsewhere. If in fact it’s a fair representation, that
the details are well-mapped onto the sketch, then detail is not going to make
things any better. Let me put it this way: I cannot see an argument that Bill
Clinton belongs in the same diagrammatic sketch with Mohammed Atta, no matter
what level of detail or depth that argument is made at. It doesn't matter if
the concept of connection or link is made in terms of monetary flows,
ideological connections, shared histories, lineal bonds: it’s not going to
work. Just look at the observation on Bill Clinton: that he is linked to other
“moderate leftists” by organizations, coalitions, funding sources, or agendas,
but also by the same dint, to everyone within David's “network.” It doesn’t
matter how detailed that argument gets, if it is made in that form, it's an
arbitrary and unfair one, because at that level of ethereal sense of
connection, Bill Clinton is equally linked to “moderate conservatism” -- in
fact, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to discern what could not be placed
within the network of DiscovertheNetwork. Barry Goldwater late in his life
became outspoken on a variety of social issues and civil liberties concerns
that connected him to some of the people on DiscovertheNetwork in very tangible
ways. Should he put up on the map?

So either DiscovertheNetwork is a bad representation of more
detailed work (in which case I wonder why David wants to do it) or it is an accurate
representation of more detailed work (in which case the detailed work itself is
certain to be overwhelmingly flawed).

I characterized Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism as
neo-conservative, not Berman himself, which I think is actually a reasonable
characterization, precisely because I think neo-conservatism in relation to
September 11th is an intellectual and political movement which encompasses
figures historically linked to the right and left, because it is an ideological
moment which functions as a bridge between so-called “liberal hawks” or figures
coming out of a left tradition like Christopher Hitchens and Norman Geras and
figures historically heavily involved in the U.S. Republican Party and
conservative politics.

But this to me illustrates the complexity of “linkage” as an idea:
that it describes political actors in some of the things that they do, but not
in all the things that they do. Someone like Paul Berman can be in one book,
one argument, one moment, linked with a political project that puts him in a
common room with other political actors who he might otherwise oppose
strenuously. You wouldn’t want to just slap him down on a chart, any chart, for
exactly that reason. People evolve, people change, people--most of them--have a
complexity and texture to the ideas they give voice to and the alliances they
form. It is entirely right and proper that we should object to the ripping away
of that texture, the loss of that richness of history in something like
DiscovertheNetwork.

Horowitz: I am somewhat conflicted in
how to reply to this response. On the one hand, I want to commend Professor
Burke for recognizing that his attack on DiscoverTheNetwork was based on
ignorance and to praise his willingness to fill in the gaps in his knowledge.
On the other, I am dismayed by the rashness with which he resumes his attack on
DiscoverTheNetwork, referring to it as a “cartoonish distortion” in advance of
doing his homework. How can you attack a database you don’t even understand?
That was the gravamen of the first part of this discussion and I thought
Professor Burke had understood and conceded the point. But apparently not. In
this response, he seems to want to preclude any possibility that he might
actually have been wrong. This, I’m afraid, is a familiar tic of the
ideological left, which feels that it is necessary to reaffirm its faith in
advance of any facts.

What Professor Burke needs to grasp before he proceeds to the next
attack is that if he were familiar with even one book among the library of
conservative texts that have been written to analyze the nature of the left --
Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions, would be one ready-to-hand
example -- he would immediately understand why everyone in the database
DiscoverTheNetwork is there and belongs there. Of course, even after
familiarizing himself with Thomas Sowell’s work or mine, or Gerhart Niemeyer’s,
or Leszek Kolakowski’s, he could remain unconvinced. But then he would have to
provide an argument as to why the perspective developed in Sowell’s text (or
the others) is wrong, along with the evidence to prove it.

DiscoverTheNetwork is not a simplification of the argument of Unholy
Alliance as Burke suggests. It is not an argument at all – and this seems
to be another missing dimension in Professor Burke’s understanding of what he
has criticized. DiscoverTheNetwork is a database. It is a picture of the left,
created according to an understanding of the history of left going back to its
creation in the French Revolution – an understanding that can be found in an
intellectual tradition of conservative critiques, of which Professor Burke is
apparently innocent.

Because he fails to understand these basic propositions, the
alternative possibilities that Burke poses are not really alternatives at all.
DiscoverTheNetwork is neither an accurate representation of my book Unholy
Alliance (or any other theoretical work about the nature of the left) nor a
bad representation, as Burke posits. It is not an attempt to present a theory
at all. It is an effort to map an active movement and its networks. This is why
even if it were an accurate representation of similar networks described in Unholy
Alliance, it would still be worth doing.

But even this may be overdoing it. Would Professor need an
elaborate argument to justify putting David Duke and Jack Kemp in a database of
the right, even though Kemp is a libertarian anti-racist and Duke is a fascist?
Would he consider ridicule and dismissal of his database as lacking all
seriousness fair comment or a reasonable argument?

DiscoverTheNetwork is an attempt to provide a catalogue of the
individuals and organizations of the left that is so comprehensive that it
could not be contained in a book (something I pointed out in the boilerplate
provided for the site itself -- “What This Site Is About?”). The explanation
for why the individuals and organizations are there is self-evident to any
conservative familiar with the conservative understanding of the left. For
those for whom it is not self-evident, there are special texts (Guides and
Issues), which are theoretical and explanatory and provided to this end. I have
already referred Professor Burke to the articles contained in the main GUIDE
and to the articles in the “Progressivism” section of Issues, and I hope he
makes himself familiar with them before returning to the discussion.

Professor Burke makes two specific points using Bill Clinton as an
example. The first is that no argument could justify putting Bill Clinton “in
the same diagrammatic sketch with Mohammed Atta, no matter what level of detail
or depth that argument is made at.” The second is that since Bill Clinton is
“equally linked to ‘moderate conservatism’” and “moderate lefitsm” he cannot be
placed anywhere (because he could be placed everywhere). These objections are
actually related. As a professor Burke deals in ideas and wants to be judged by
his ideas, and apparently thinks everyone else should be also. But Bill Clinton
is a politician. He only succeeds, and in a sense only exists, as a politician
through his ability to organize and gain the support of activist
constituencies.These constituencies
form themselves around political issues. At The end of his first term, Clinton
pursued a policy of “triangulation” – embracing conservative policies like
welfare reform in order to garner votes among conservatives, because his
leftwing base was not large enough to guarantee him a government majority. His
advisor Dick Morris told him point blank that he would lose the election if he
did not embrace welfare reform and move to the right. These facts do not make
Bill Clinton a free-floating, self-defining luftmensch. He is a moderate
leader who had to tack to the right to get re-elected, but whose political base
is the left.

There is no diagrammatic sketch linking Bill Clinton and Mohammed
Atta in the sense that Professor Burke suggests. Perhaps the word “Network” is
misleading if it suggests to him. But there are undoubtedly networks in the
database which would provide such a link. Is this problematic. The familiar
play argues that every person on the planet is linked by six degrees of
separation, so why not Clinton and Mohammed Atta? The question is not whether
such links can be found, but whether they are significant and whether they
matter.

It is here that Professor Burke moves to an extreme when he says
that there is no database that could include them no matter what level
of detail or depth one goes to. I wonder whether Professor Burke would on
reflection want to defend such a statement. In a database of Americans, Polly
Klass and her murderer will both be found. In a database of Communists, Leon
Trotsky and his murderer will both be found. Michael Moore has defended the
Mohammed Atta terrorists as “patriots” and “revolutionaries” and has himself enjoyed
the support of the leadership of the Democratic Party despite the fact that he
wants America to lose the war in Iraq. Is there no level of detail then that
would include people who think like Michael Moore and Bill Clinton who might
dissociate himself from Michael Moore (but oddly doesn’t so) in the same
database?

Professor Burke’s point about Paul Berman illustrates another
confusion in his position. I must confess I find his claim that Paul Berman’s
book can be regarded as politically distinct from Paul Berman simply
incoherent. Burke views Berman’s book as “neo-conservative” (a movement that he
seems to think began on 9/11) even though Berman is a socialist, has been a
passionate leftist his entire life and generally despises conservatives.

In Burke’s lexicon “neo-conservatism” seems to mean support for
the war in Iraq. A socialist who supports the war in Iraq becomes in Burke’s
view a neo-conservative in the very act of doing so. In this usage,
“neo-conservatism” is no longer an intellectual concept. It has become merely a
derogatory label for people who don’t share Burke’s antagonism to the war. Did
Marxists who remained anti-fascists during the period of Stalin’s Pact with
Hitler stop being Marxists for those two years? That would seem to be the
implication of Burke’s view. In Burke’s handling the concept of “linkage”
becomes so “complex” that it sees to have any use at all other that to describe
conspiracies or complicities in a specific and clearly defined enterprise. In
this argument Burke seems to be objecting to the use of categories like “left”
and “right” altogether, because people have views at times and places that
don’t obviously confine themselves to the defined limits of left and right. For
example, by this reasoning if Joseph Stalin writes a democratic constitution as
he did for the Soviet Union in 1936, he cannot be described as a Communist, or
a totalitarian.

This is obviously absurd, and I’m sure in his more reflective moments
Professor Burke realizes it. The whole world has been talking about “left” and
“right” for centuries, even though the complexities that Professor Burke refers
to do exist. To understand Paul Berman’s support for the Iraq war, you would
have to spend some time understanding Paul Berman’s leftism, and his
understanding of the left. Reading his book Terror and Liberalism, would
be a good starting point, provided you don’t mistake it for a “neo-conservative
text. If you did that, you would not understand him at all.

Professor Burke’s own desire to escape from the contingencies of
his and other leftists’ positions and to fly off into the free air of noble
intentions and abstract ideals is understandable, given thegrievous history of leftwing practice in the
20th Century and its indefensible opposition to the liberation of 25
million Iraqis in the 21st. Understandable as this desire may be,
however, it is not intellectually tenable – at least not outside the cozy, self-validating
precincts of an academic world that has successfully purged conservative
critics from its conversations. This dialogue, on the other hand, is not taking
place in an academic setting, and if Professor Burke is going to insist that
there is no linkage between Islamic radicals and American leftists, or between
the ideals of the left and its totalitarian practices, he is going to have make
the case and not merely assert it.

FP: Prof. Timothy Burke and David
Horowitz, thank you for joining us. This concludes what we hope will only
be the first part of a
lengthy series of conversations with the Left about
radicalism, leftism, liberalism and conservatism.